Author: Paul Garwood
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 30, 2006
Introduction: Many of the first Pakistani
migrants to Britain came from rural, conservative backgrounds and oppose letting
their children-particularly daughters-marry into the more liberal British
society
HER father said it would be a two-week holiday
to learn about her Pakistani heritage. But 20-year-old Britisher Shazia (name
changed) soon found herself captive in a remote tribal village for over a
year and promised in marriage to a cousin she had never met.
With the British High Commission's help this
month, she escaped Pakistan shortly before her planned wedding, avoiding the
phenomenon of forced marriage that befalls scores of foreign women annually
in this conservative Islamic country.
"My dad made me believe it was just a
holiday," said Shazia. "I never believed my own father would have
a plan to marry me to someone I didn't know. I was wrong."
More than 100 British nationals of Pakistani
descent-20 percent of them males as young as 14-have been rescued in each
of the past two years after being forced into marriages here. But this could
be just the tip of the iceberg, officials say.
Reasons abound for foreigners being forced
to wed here. Britain is home to more than 8 lakh Britons of Pakistani descent.
Many of the first Pakistani migrants to Britain came from rural, conservative
backgrounds and oppose letting their children-particularly daughters-marry
into the more liberal British society.
"It is unacceptable for such fathers
living in Britain to allow their daughters to grow up in an emancipated society
where they could possibly meet men," Sumaira Malik, Pakistani minister
for women's affairs, said on Monday. "So they force their girls to come
back here and marry boys from their village."
Describing forced marriages as "despicable"
and contrary to Pakistan and Islamic law, Malik said the government is committed
to improving educational standards and women's freedoms. An example she cites
is the proposed Protection of Women's Rights Bill, which aims to change a
controversial Islamic rape law that needs the testimony of four witnesses
to prosecute a rape case.
Rape features prominently in forced marriages
of foreigners, said Helen Feather, head of consular affairs at the British
High Commission. Women forced to wed against their will are often raped so
they become pregnant, produce children and, in turn, cement themselves in
an unwanted family union. Obtaining British nationality is also sought after
by the husband in a bid to improve his economic situation.
In Shazia's case, for more than a year, she
was made to live as a rural Pakistani villager in the North West Frontier
Province-wearing local clothes, cooking food, cleaning the house, fetching
water from a nearby well and milking cows.
But all the while, she said she was treated
as an outsider by suspicious relatives who were accomplices to the plan to
marry her off to a cousin in the same village so he could eventually gain
British citizenship.
"They didn't care at all about me, they
just cared about that little red (UK) passport," she said. "My year
here was horrible."
About a year later, Shazia's 18-year-old sister
was also forced to travel to Pakistan to join her elder sibling, believing
it would be a short trip. But she too was being groomed for a village marriage.
However, she had heard that British authorities
had a dedicated team in Pakistan to help British nationals forced to marry
here. Once in Pakistan, she got word to British High Commission officials
of her and her sister's whereabouts.
At an arranged time, a team of British officials, backed by local police,
drove to the house where the sisters were kept and ordered an uncle to give
back their passports before driving them away to safety.
They have since returned to Britain and vowed
to not contact their father. British authorities are assisting them with
and a loan.
Khalida Salimi, director of Pakistani NGO
Struggle for Change, said: "It will take some time to make people understand
that parents can't treat their children as commodities. But in Pakistan, women
and children are generally considered as possessions, not people."
- LAT
